August 1933
To pretend that way was a refuge, but one that could not be sustained. After two weeks of bliss, we returned to Washington. Nora reclaimed her role as first lady of the land, and I traveled from Washington by train, then two hours by bus, on my way to Morgantown, West Virginia—the first stop of my new job.
Nora hadn’t been exaggerating when she said she had a hundred ideas for what I should do now that I’d been, ahem, retired from reporting. The government was hiring, and my unpaid bills made the decision easy. I thought of the job as “itinerant paper pusher for Uncle Sam,” but “investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration” was my official title. It was a title trumped up by Nora, I knew, to make the task sound more journalistic and less like what it actually was—traveling the downtrodden swaths of this great land, shadowing local administrators at budget meetings and typing up dreary reports of their troubles. Politics, along with a healthy dose of old-fashioned bureaucratic incompetence, was keeping the people from getting the food, jobs, housing assistance, and other help the president had promised in his New Deal. Harry Hopkins, the head of the agency and my new boss, claimed he was depending on my reports to figure out how to get around the horseshit and actually help people.
It was a far cry from a front-page byline, and I missed New York and my evenings at Dom’s. John, of course, still had not spoken to me since the day I’d left the newsroom. And I missed Nora. The worst part was that I’d had to sublet my Mitchell Place apartment—I’d be traveling constantly and it didn’t make sense to keep it—and had to send Prinz out to the Long Island kennel indefinitely. But things had changed. I had to accept it. If I didn’t die of boredom in the new gig, I thought I’d be all right.
The half-full bus to Morgantown smelled of sweat and tobacco juice that made slick spatters on the aisle floor. I wrenched open the small window next to my seat, hoping to get a whiff of the clean mountain air my travel book promised. The faint breeze did little to remedy the aroma of the bus, but I liked the improved view. The vast forests rolled up one side of the mountain and down the other, like waves on the sea, and here and there streams and chalky gray crags broke through the mass of green. The scene would have made a pretty postcard if it hadn’t been framed by the grimy window.
Beside me, a man in a stained undershirt picked his nose with a dirty finger and examined what he pulled out of it. I puffed my cheeks in disgust and turned back toward the window. The man then unwrapped a sandwich that seemed to consist of raw onions, pickles, and horseradish so strong it made my eyes water. I inched slowly closer to the far edge of my seat.
“Say,” said the man as he licked his fingers, “how about a drink before we go our separate ways?”
If ever I doubted that my preference for women proved I had both good sense and sound aesthetics, this man offered ample reassurance. “I’d love to,” I said in the coy whisper of a debutante, “but I’m wanted for murder. Can’t take the risk of being seen.”
His eyes grew wide and he turned away just as we pulled, mercifully, into the Morgantown bus station. He stood, swung his bag over his shoulder, and began edging up the aisle, as far away from me as possible.
In the parking lot, a lanky man leaned against a car, squinting into the sun and holding up a sign that read hickok. I made my way over to him, my overnight bag banging against my knee, its contents sloshing. The humidity had turned mere breathing into a chore, and I was longing for a bath, a meal, and three fingers of bourbon, though not necessarily in that order. Nora had tried to extract a promise from me that I would not drink while I was on the road, but I’d said only, “I’ll try,” and made sure to pack the good stuff so I wouldn’t be out combing the mountains for moonshine come evening.
“Clarence Pickett,” he said, and put out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Hickok.”
I liked him instantly because of the unhurried way in which he spoke and his kind blue eyes. Clarence was the head of the Quaker relief services, volunteers from the Society of Friends who had spent decades serving the people of coal country in West Virginia. What seemed like the permanent poverty of this region had grown much worse when all the mines shut down a few years back. From my advance briefing, I had learned that Clarence and his cohort delivered food and first aid kits, blankets and towels and canning jars. But all of that was like a whisper in the gale.
“How did you get roped into being my chauffeur?” I asked. The county must be pretty bad off, I thought, if an administrator couldn’t be bothered to pick me up himself.
“Well, the government people will have plenty to tell you, I’m sure,” Clarence said as he folded the sign with my name on it and put it in his pocket. “But I wanted to get you out of town and into these camps so that you could see what we’re dealing with.”
That sounds ominous, I couldn’t help but think. Clarence waited patiently while I sucked down a Pall Mall and then opened the passenger door for me. He crossed in front to the other side and took off his hat before settling behind the wheel. I smiled at the way he sat erect, with the top of his head gracing the car’s ceiling. His face had a scrubbed look, and though I was entirely wilted, he seemed as cool as a swimming trout, as if those who were right with God could travel in their own pleasant weather systems.
Before long, we were outside Morgantown and sliding deeper into the hills on narrow roads that were dark in midday beneath the tunnel of trees. A pheasant wandered into the road, and Clarence braked gently to let it pass. On our right was a shack that was completely overgrown with honeysuckle, as if the mountain had reached out its arms to smother it to death.
“Where to, Mr. Pickett?”
“Osage, one of the towns that make up this region they call Scotts Run. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of deprivation in your line of work back in New York City, Miss Hickok, but I feel I have to tell you to prepare yourself.”
I didn’t like the sound of Clarence’s warning at all. I was only here to document the dull work of bureaucrats in airless rooms—not to see any camps for myself, not to have to steel myself against some devastating sight.
“Oh, and if anyone offers you a drink of water, don’t take it,” he said. “It all comes out of the same river as the diphtheria.”
We pulled into a clearing, and Clarence parked the car in the bare dirt. A sloping lane ran along a stream, and shacks and tents dotted the side of the hill all the way down. After the smell—human waste mixed with something chemical I assumed had to do with the mines—the first thing I noticed was the black dust. I dragged my finger through it on the hood of the car.
“That’s coal dust,” Clarence said, gesturing to the headlights with his long finger. “The mines open occasionally for work and it all gets stirred up again. You’ll find it in your teeth tonight, in the seams of your clothing. There’s no avoiding it.” We walked into the trees, many of them strangely bare, and over to the riverbank.
“And here we have the ‘run’ this place is named for,” Clarence said. “More like a walk. A long, filthy one at that.” The stream moved slowly and paused in eddies tinged an unholy array of colors—green with some soap-fueled overgrowth of moss, a foaming chemical red-orange, a slimy yellowish brown from God only knew what.
What in the hell have I gotten myself into? I thought.
I recoiled but then tried to conceal my reaction, but Clarence shook his head. “You don’t have to try to be polite for their sakes,” he said, sounding angry for the first time. “This here is a wretched place, and people living this way while others eat prime rib in Manhattan is a sin as egregious as murder. These folks aren’t exactly proud of living here, so don’t try to flatter them or pretend you haven’t noticed the conditions. Let them see your outrage. It’s one of the few kindnesses we can give them.”
We walked back to the lane and over to the first shack, a one-room hovel of nailed bare board and a cobbled-together tin roof. A curtain hung where the door should be, so, instead of knocking, Clarence called, “Hello?” A breeze stirred the fabric, and I saw what was behind it: a dirt floor, a table with a single chair. On the table was a bowl full of scraps most country people would feed their pigs: apple cores, potato peels. A pair of flies circled the food.
A woman with a weathered face and greasy clump of hair emerged from behind the shack, a heavy pail full of sopping laundry propped on her hip. Several small children orbited her skirt, each of them stark naked and streaked with mud.
We walked over to her. I drew in a breath at the sight of a girl about six years old, covered in sores all over her trunk. Some of them were scabbed, but the others were shiny with pus. She sat down in the dirt and whimpered.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Johnson,” Clarence said. “I have someone I’d like you to meet.”
The woman set the pail down and wiped her hands on the front of her dress. Then she plucked up the smallest child, a little blond boy with a snub nose. He clung to the shoulder of her faded calico dress, which was threadbare at the hips and revealed her bare skin beneath. Even undergarments seemed to be a luxury these folks could not afford.
“This is Miss Hickok,” Clarence said. “From Washington, DC.” I opened my mouth to remind him that I was a New Yorker, actually, but then remembered I no longer lived there.
I held out my hand. As the woman stared at it, I got a whiff of her and the children, and it took everything in my person not to take a big step backward. I thought of the various pests that might be making a home in their hair and felt my skin begin to itch. There was something familiar about her—her posture, her wariness. It plucked at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Clarence continued to broker our meeting in his unhurried way. “Miss Hickok has come to talk with you all about how things are going for you here, what you think the government should do to help. She is here to advocate for you all.”
The woman’s mouth twisted into a wry smile I could see she reserved for expressing disbelief in things she’d heard tell of but never seen— elevators, ice cream, talking pictures in movie houses with plush seats and electric fans. Never in her life, I could see, had someone from the government shown the slightest interest in her welfare. The boy on her hip buried his face in her hair.
“Ruth Johnson,” she said, finally taking my hand with her free one. She looked back at Clarence. “What do you mean ‘how things are going’?”
“I mean, is the relief helping you get what you need? Do you have enough food? Things like that.”
I touched the pocket of my skirt where I kept my small notebook and pencil, but I decided against pulling them out at that moment. If Ruth clammed up, I wouldn’t be able to get what I needed to write my report.
“Well,” she said hesitantly, surveying her house and the shacks and tents beyond, as if I were the stupidest person alive not to know the answers to Clarence’s questions, “I guess we’re doing all right for now. We’re supposed to get fifteen dollars a month from the county, but lately it has been just ten. And usually they run out of money that last week, so we have to make do. Last month, one of Mr. Pickett’s people here got her hands on a big sack of flour and passed it out. So we had that, but it weren’t much.”
The discrepancy in the payments piqued my reporter’s interest and I nodded. “What do they say, the people from the county?” I asked. “How do they explain that they’ve run out of money?” I figured it could be corruption, dry coffers, or both.
“I never asked,” Ruth said. Her bottom row of teeth looked like little brown pebbles, and I noticed a faint rash around her mouth and up the sides of her jaw. “All I know is, we got school starting in a month, and the older children need clothes. And shoes. They just reopened some of the mines, but it won’t last long. And, anyway, my husband, Norbert, is blacklisted for talking to the union, the fool. He ain’t worked in years.”
Just then the little boy peed down the front of her dress.
I sucked in my breath before I could stop myself, my aversion all too apparent, but Ruth just glanced down at the wet spot and shrugged. She looked like the most exhausted woman in the world, as if it were her job to carry the entire mine-scarred hillside on her shoulders, with a baby on her hip besides.
“Is that all, then?” she asked. “I got to get that laundry wrung out.”
I made myself take her hand again. “Thank you for telling me all this, Mrs. Johnson,” I said, my voice too loud, too cheerful. I was facing a steep learning curve in this new endeavor, I realized. The job was nothing like what I’d imagined it would be. She stared at me, as if she were waiting for more. “I can promise you—Washington’s going to hear about it.”
Ruth looked at me like I was speaking Greek backward. “Oh, you mean that Roosevelt fellow? I heard about him. But I don’t think Jesus Christ himself could make a lick of difference out here.”
That makes two of us, I nearly said back.
For the rest of the day, as Clarence took me from one family to the next, the despair of the place engulfed me. I’d covered tragedies in my time as a reporter, but they were mostly accidents—fires, car wrecks— or one-off crimes of passion and drunkenness. This suffering seemed different. Perpetual. The mines had brought people here during the boom twenty years back and then left them stranded on the hillside when the coal market collapsed, Clarence explained. And no one but the Quaker relief people seemed to care.
“What’s wrong with the children’s skin?” I asked him, afraid to know the answer.
“Those sores come from bathing in the river. It’s the pollution. And then there’s the diphtheria, like I said, and the typhoid, the rickets, the dysentery.” He counted them off on his fingers. “All of which could be resolved with proper sanitation, wells, and waste disposal. But we don’t have the funds to do it.”
I thought with longing, and then chagrin, of the room Nora and I had shared at Le Château Frontenac, decorated all in white and pale green like an ice cream sundae with mint candies. It seemed to be on another planet. Clarence introduced me to one sad story after another: young men who were as gnarled as old codgers, leaking tents, women wearing nothing but their slips. There was no livestock anywhere nearby, so no milk or eggs, to say nothing of meat. Most families kept a little garden, and Clarence had tried to help them can their yield, but they never had enough jars and often got too hungry to wait for the vegetables to mature anyway. He had seen them dig up bitter green potatoes, he told me, small as knuckles, and eat them raw.
It was too much, a Gothic melodrama, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. When we finally returned to the car, I nearly wailed with relief.
“Now you understand what I was trying to tell you,” Clarence said as he switched on the ignition. “If only I could get other people down here to see it too. What we need to do is get these folks out of this polluted hollow. I’ve written letters about it to just about everyone I can think of, including the Roosevelts. And now they sent you here, which I’ve got to think means someone is listening.”
I gave him a weak smile, afraid to make any promises. “All I can tell you is that this report will be one for the ages, Mr. Pickett,” I said. But what a meager offering that was—a government report hardly anyone would read.
We retraced the dark mountain roads, and Clarence drove me to my hotel in Morgantown. He parked the car and stepped out, fitting his hat on his head.
“I’ll be back in the morning to collect you,” he said after he opened my door and helped me out of the car, “and we’ll go see a settlement near Cassville.”
There’s more? I thought, not sure I could take it. He took my suitcase from the compartment beneath the rumble seat, and before he could offer to carry it inside, I grasped the handle.
“I just have the one,” I said.
“Are you sure? You’ve got your portable to carry too.”
“It’s fine,” I said, and thought of the promise of sweet relief secreted in my suitcase like the glimmer of quartz in an old stone. I was afraid the sound of its slosh would give me away.
“Have you got anything to read?” He seemed to be stalling, as if he were a little worried about leaving me on my own. “It’s good if you can do something to take your mind off it.”
We were both thinking the same thing: How do you sit down to a good meal after that? How do you brush your teeth and take a hot bath after you have seen a naked child with weeping sores and no doctor in sight?
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ve got my report to type up, and I’ll go get a sandwich. I brought a mystery novel too.” The Case of the Empty Bottle, I thought.
He nodded once. “All right. I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, and crossed back to the driver’s side door.
“Clarence?”
He looked back at me, his face open and gentle as the moon.
I felt a welling in my heart for him, for the steadfast way he went out to see those people day in, day out. And all the while, I had been lounging in my New York apartment listening to opera records, blissfully unaware. “You are doing good work out there. My hat is off to you, sir.”
“Well, it has been a long haul,” he said. “But now that you are here, Miss Hickok, maybe we’ll see some progress.”
My throat closed up a little at his words. I didn’t like to imagine being responsible for delivering what those mining families needed. What if no one listened to me? What if I couldn’t make anything happen? Why in the hell had I let Nora talk me into this job? “I’ll do what I can,” I said.
He gave me a grim smile. “I hope so. We’re counting on you.”
Clarence waved as he drove away. I trudged into the hotel and checked in as quickly as I could. With immense relief, I lugged my bag to my room, where I closed and locked the door. Immediately I fished a glass out of the bathroom. Too tired—hell, too eager—to go in search of ice, I unearthed bourbon and poured.
With my portable set up on the desk, I began recording all the details I could remember from the day. When he had hired me, Hopkins had warned me never to sugarcoat the details in my reports for his sake, and I didn’t. I described the shacks and the people I had met—the naked, infirm children; the out-of-work men; the barefoot women. I passed along what Ruth had said about the fishy last-week-of-the-month business. The gardens, I explained, were set in the side of a hill so steep, the seeds must have been shot into it with a gun in order to make them stick.
I took a break to freshen my drink and stood at the window, looking out through the gap in the gauzy peach drapes at the gravel parking lot and the green mountains beyond. The dense trees made me think of the forests of New Brunswick, where, at the end of our vacation, Nora and I had spent a whole day driving as we made our way to Maine and points south. It was late in the day as we barreled through a tunnel of dark forest, no houses in sight, when we emerged suddenly into a bright clearing. What I saw made me gasp. All around the car, in every direction, stood thousands of blackened tree trunks. The ground too was covered in soot and nothing moved among the desiccated poles, no birds or butterflies or rabbits. I had never seen the remnants of a forest fire—back in Bowdle there were not enough trees to burn—and the destruction was staggering. Nora slowed the car and we watched as the black trunks passed one after another, hypnotic like the succession of frames in a moving picture.
“It will take a long time,” Nora had said, giving me an uneasy look, “but the trees will grow back.”
And I’d nodded, too haunted to speak. It was fitting, I’d thought darkly, that we would end our heavenly vacation in such a harrowing way. I wanted to believe her—I wanted to believe that eventually it would rain and the ground would give up the sprouts, and the soot would be concealed beneath the fresh layer of bark that would grow on the trees. Perhaps in a few years we could drive that same stretch of road again and not know the forest had been ravaged. But the trees would know. They would carry the memory in their bodies.
Standing at the window in the Morgantown hotel, I felt around the inside of my mouth with my tongue and, just as Clarence had predicted, felt the grit of coal dust. I took my drink back to the desk and sat down once more at the typewriter. The paper curled in the miserable humidity that made everything droop, and, as my hands went to the keys, I realized what was getting under my skin, just like that soot got under the trees: Ruth was the kind of woman I knew down in my bones. Ruth was my mother, my grandmother. And if I hadn’t left Bowdle, hadn’t found my way to the newsroom, I could have wound up just like her.
“Nora, just what in the hell—did I lose a bet I don’t know about?” I tried to keep my voice light, but I was tired and a little drunk and it was hard to breathe in the enclosed space of the phone booth in the hotel lobby. It was about nine that evening and I had just wired my report— an opus in three pages fueled by sore feet and despair—to Harry.
Nora’s voice was bright. “There, you see? I told you it wouldn’t be as dull as you feared. Now, I have to run. We are dining with the attaché to Panama, and I just popped up here to check my messages before they serve dessert.”
Her breeziness annoyed me. It had been such a trying day, and here she was off to crème brûlée and hot chocolate from a silver pot. “Nora, hang on for just a moment. I think you need to know that— well, something is very wrong down here in coal country. The way these folks are being forced to live … I knew it was going to be bad, but it’s so much… worse.”
I heard talking in the background and then the crackle of Nora pressing her hand over the mouthpiece and giving someone an instruction. Another crackle, and she came back on. “And this is exactly why you’re there, Hick. Put it all in your report. Wire it to Harry—then the wheels will start to turn.”
I sighed, annoyed.
“I’m sorry, darling, I wish I could talk longer, but I really do have to go.”
“Nora,” I nearly shouted. “Wait. Just a minute. And listen. The report is in. But it’s not enough …” In a rush, I told her everything I had witnessed on my tour with Clarence. And I could almost see how, as the horror tumbled out of my mouth, she paused in her rush to get back to the party, sat down with the phone cradled against her shoulder. I dared to hope she began to take notes.
“And no doctor has been out to see them?” she asked.
“No. Clarence says they won’t come unless they are guaranteed payment. And of course these people don’t have a penny. I just don’t see how a three-page report is going to do them any good. This is a goddamn emergency down here,” I said. “Like a natural disaster— except there’s nothing natural about it.”
Nora was quiet for another moment and then I heard more rustling, the squeak of a hinge. “Just a minute,” she called to someone.
“I know you have to go,” I said. “I know you are surrounded, every minute, by people who want something from you.”
She did not reply and I heard still more noise, someone calling from the hallway. The suffering in Scotts Run was desperate, and I wanted Nora to conclude, as I had, that the situation was urgent, based on the facts at hand. But I had more selfish aims too: I wanted it to matter that those facts were coming from me in particular. What if the distance had eroded our connection? Only weeks ago we had been on a kind of honeymoon, but now she felt remote. What if I had become just one more voice in the throng, pleading for her attention?
I switched the earpiece to my left side and wiped my clammy cheek with the back of my hand. With the toe of my shoe, I wedged the door of the booth open to get some air. The lobby smelled of mildew and pipe smoke. Nora, I knew, would be fresh with lilac perfume, the lemon juice in which she soaked her nails to bleach them white.
“I’m sorry, darling—they are calling for me and I have to go.”
And then she hung up the phone.